Two Queens, so that the end has come sooner than
we thought, and in many respects the last state is better than the first. The
earlier part of the work, which appeared about a year ago, brought Katharine's life down to her marriage with Henry VIII.; it was not possible then to guess the number of volumes that might be following, and it is an agreeable surprise to find that these two volumes complete the work. They will be found more readable from the mere fact that there is more in them about the two Queens themselves and their friends, and less about Friends of Light and Spanish nobodies. In addition to this improvement, there is a decreasing tendency to bestow nicknames, and though end- less relatives of various statesmen are thrust forward unnecessarily, they do not so often start up under half-a-dozen different names. Mr. Dixon's style remains the same, and is, as every one knows, chiefly made up of short passages, full of sensational effects and startling English ; but with his natural ability for graphic descrip- tions, and his undoubted power of writing effectively, we cannot understand and must condemn his putting into print such intoler- able rubbish as the following ;—" The young and lovely mother of Anne Boleyn died, leaving her three little ones, the eldest not
eleven years old, to the care of a great-grandfather, a grandfather, a grandmother, a step-grandmother, and a tribe of aunts ;" and again, a little further on, that Anne Boleyn "had no mother to
direct her steps, but in a mother's stead she had a step- mother, a grandmother, a step-grandmother, and a host of aunts
on both her father's and her mother's sides." Are these all ? In his personal portraiture, Mr. Dixon, though true, perhaps too true to life, is generally far too forcible ; there is a something in his word-painting which repels and makes one turn away from his best drawn characters ; it is a habit that clings to his pen, and he would seem unable to check it, though in these later volumes we think we can detect an effort to do so.
Mr. Dixon affects too much of private domesticity of manner. The moment Katharine has reason to believe she may expect a child, Mr. Dixon takes his readers confidentially aside, and lets them hear 'Katharine whisper into Henry's ear, and make his face glow with the news of her maternal hopes ;' this does not occur once, but every time an heir to the throne was looked for, and that was pretty often :—
" On Wednesday morning Catharine felt a pain in one of her knees, and had to keep her room. The King was with her ; also her confessor, her physician and her Spanish women. No one else was trusted with the secrets of that royal chamber. Fox was no more in her confidence than Warham. Montjoy and Compton were equally in the dark. No English lady, no English councillor was summoned to the ante- room. Badoer was aware that Henry was alert with hope, but the Venetian could not learn from spies and abigails when his heir was likely to be born. No one else knew anything. The English people were so perfectly deceived, that no man save the King himself was privy to the facts. The symptoms grow more serious as the night wore on. Next morning, Thursday, the thirty-first day of January, 1510, a royal babe was born. It was a female child, and, it was deacL" Amongst the royal babes that were born alive and those that were born dead Mr. Dixon has managed to mystify himself ; perhaps this is not surprising, if we remember the " mystery " that, by his showing, attended the birth of every child of Katharine's. He writes (1510) :—" A mystery hardly less com- plete than that which had concealed the birth of Catharine's boy, concealed from common eyes the story of her second girl." What boy ? She had as yet had none. So far as we have observed, there are fewer mistakes than are common with Mr. Dixon, and we congratulate him on yet another step in the right direction. We should like to have seen some mention of the meeting of the Kings of England and France on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at which Queen Katharine was present ; but Mr. Dixon does not open his lips on the subject, and considering the interesting details revealed through our Record Office of that last display of the favourite pastime of the medimval age, it is singular Mr. Dixon has ignored a subject so suited to his pen ; it would have been far more acceptable, and quite as relevant, as those endless chapters on Spanish matters with which the previous volumes teemed. We may remark here that Charles, about whom natu- rally much has to be said, would have been recognised sooner had a V. been put after his name ; one is so accustomed to hear the great Emperor and rival of Francis I. called Charles V., that Charles by itself is insufficient, whilst Francis I. would have been more familiar to English eyes than Francois d'Angoulotue or Francois. The spelling of " Fitzwater " for " Fitzwalter " is ugly, and, more- over, be was not made Earl of Egremont ; there was no such History of Two Queens. By William Hepworth Dixon. Vols. III. and IV. London: Hurst and Blackett. title then ; it had become extinct in 1400, and it was not revived until 1749; he was made Viscount Fitzwalter in 1525, when so many other titles were created in honour of the King's son, and
later on he became Earl of Sussex. Sometimes Mr. Dixon appears almost to go out of his way to puzzle his readers. Who would gum, for instance, that the lady referred to in the following sen- tence was simply the King's wife ?—" A glance was thrown at Spain as well as Rome, and then the reasons which had led the King to separate himself from the Emperor's aunt were given." But these matters are not important, except to show that Mr. Dixon is not careful in small things.
-Volume III. deals principally with the divorce question between Henry VIII. and Katharine, which before long became a Euro-
pean question. Independent and imperious as the English monarch was, it seemed as if he could not do without the moral support of either France or Spain in his dilemma, and yet those countries were equally anxious to be allied with him ; the contro- versy was heightened by the participation of the Emperor of Germany and the Pope ; both these personages were directly concerned in the matter, Charles V. as nephew of the Queen, and therefore opposed to the divorce, and the Pope as having originally sanc- tioned Henry's marriage with his brother's widow. Ferdinand's perfidy in Spain towards the English monarch who was befriending him against the French was the first act in this European drama. The awakening of Henry VIII. to the fact that he had been duped by the Spanish King was the first shadow that stole across the brightness of his married life, and that shadow deepened and lengthened until it wrapped him in his grave. He began to think
he had been trapped into marrying the daughter of this Spanish traitor, and the thought was aggravated by the oft-heard omen that 'he who married his brother's widow should have no children ;' but Katharine "whispered in his ear that he would soon salute his heir," yet time wore on and no son was born ; and by degrees it dawned upon him that he was living in a state of sin, since he had no right to Arthur's widow. Then he separated from her and re- sumed a bachelor life, waiting for the divorce that should leave him free to marry Anne Boleyn :— " The fight was long and fierce. Realm, Church, and family appeared to be divided, each against itself, by an internal force. Each seemed to have a male and a female side. The males were mostly for reform, the females mostly against reform. The males were mostly Friends of Light, pupils of the now learning, supporters of the printing-press ; the females mostly slaves of tradition, worshippers of relics, believers in the miracles of saints. From principles, the division dropped to persons. As the friends of Lady Anne were men of the now order, most of the males wore favourable to Anne. As the friends of Catharine were of the old order, nearly all the females were favourable to Catharine. The Universities decided by a vast majority for the King and Anne ; but when the King's confessor wont to Oxford, he was stoned by female furies in the market-place."
Henry, tired of waiting, cut the matter short by dispensing with the divorce, defied Rome, dubbed hitnself Head of the Church, and married Anne Boleyn, then Marchioness of Pembroke.
The last volume relates, of course, to her and the circumstances that brought about her fall. Mr. Dixon certainly does not include her, as the Portuguese poet Mascaren has done, in the catalogue of women who have become famous by the evil of which they have been the occasion, "from Eve to Anne Boleyn," and he has made out a strong case in her favour, and this, as we must admit, after weighing the evidence of hostile writers, and searching far and wide for materials in support of the cause of his martyr-queen. The account of her early life, of the girl at Hever, of her letters and her sayings, shows immense research, and deserves credit for the handling and selection of what was suitable from the stores before him. In strong contrast to Anne's resignation he describes Henry's brutality. No longer "kind and affable, full of graciousness and courtesy, and liberal," as Faller wrote to the Venetian Senate in 1531, his nature had entirely changed. Disappointed in his hopes of male issue, he wanted to be rid of his second wife ; but as no guilt could be brought home to her, the only means of ridding himself of her was by murder, and this he carried out in the most brutal manner. "But she was not to die, as Rochford and the rest had suffered, by the stroke of an old English axe. In France they had a method of executing criminals by the sword, and Henry, wishing to introduce that method into England, chose to have the first experiment tried on his own wife "I After the trial was over and Anne had been condemned to die, Cranmer, in hopes of saving her life, called together his ecclesias- tical Court, and on the strength of a doubtful engagement in her old maiden days with Percy, declared her marriage with the King null and void :— " No longer Queen, Anne was now Lady Anne Boleyn, Marchioness of Pembroke. She was not the King's wife, and it was held that she had never been his wife. The legal consequences were that the late trial was void, and the condemnation quaslitid. She had been tried as Queen when she was not a Queen. She had been sentenced for alleged offences against the King, as being her husband, when the King, as now declared, had never been her husband. If the marriage was of no effect, Anne, not being Henry's wife, had been unable to commit a conjugal offence against him. If the sentence of divorce were right, the trial for adultery was wrong, and any verdict given in consequence was void in law. Granmer had every reason to suppose his judgment would be followed by an order for Lady Anne's release. Twelve hours after his sentence was pronounced, that order reached the Tower—an order for her execution on the following day."
The best writing and the most interesting matter will be found in the latter half of the concluding volume, where Mr. Dixon has concentrated his descriptive powers on the closing scenes of Anne Boleyn's life. Full of strong and dramatic attraction of their own, the several incidents in her unhappy end claim our sympathy and admiration, and they stand out in Mr. Dixon's bands in clear and pleasing outline. In writing the lives of Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Mr. Dixon has selected a subject and a period of unusual interest ; he has worked hard and successfully with his materials, and we think has brought out a work that, among those who admire the dress in which he habitually presente his historical characters,—we need hardly say we are not among them,—will bring him more credit than his other productions of a similar nature.
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